Reignite

Seeking paradise in Cardiff

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Deciding where to live

The first ministry decision I had to make when I was appointed to Cardiff was deciding where to live. And this really was a ministry decision, a theological decision, a spiritual decision. My work is, in its simplest form, to love my neighbours. To be true to that calling I really do need to be a neighbour.

My calling is to be a citizen: to live, work, shop, vote, walk in the city I'm called to serve. I could not do it any other way. My calling is to be as committed as I can be to a particular place; to be a neighbour.

I decided to live in Canton. Though it could have just easily have been neighbouring Riverside, it just depended what place was available when I was house-hunting. I wanted somewhere close to the city centre with stuff going on. A place that felt more like a neighbourhood and not just a place where people live.

Canton, I guess, is much like a lot of inner city areas. It is neither the "worst" area nor the "best" area in Cardiff. It is fairly diverse socio-economically with both larger suburban homes as well as smaller flats and houses. Compared to Bolton (where I have come from) the rent is much more expensive, I guess largely because it close to the city centre. It has a lot of restaurants and a certain artistic community around the Chapter Arts Centre. (That is a very quick summary of Canton, based on only a few months living here, no doubt I will have a different impression in a few years when I've got to know the place better).

I may not always be in Canton, but it is a good start. What I am committed to, though, is the city and the inner city. Paul Keeble, in his book Mission With talks about his experience living in inner city Manchester, and deciding to stay there as a spiritual decision, as a matter of Christian discipleship. He points out that in Britain Christianity is largely middle-class and perpetuates a middle-class culture. Christians, he argues, conform to a middle class culture by assuming that as you get more successful in life, you aspire to live in better houses in better neighbourhoods. He asks whether this is truly consistent with following Jesus. His local church, he said, really encouraged people to commit to the area and to live there long-term. That's what he and his family did.

Paul Keeble's book, however, really talks about the experience of inner city Manchester in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. And I wonder how this dynamic is changing as more and more people in Britain now live in city centres. Young, professional, often single people now fill our city centres, and probably will start now to spill out into the areas just outside city centres. It may be that such pressures push older, poorer communities out of "the inner city" in a process of gentrification.

I've been thinking of the danger of contributing to gentrification myself. I have moved to inner Cardiff as an outsider, a 30-something professional with (for the most part) the tastes of a 30-something professional. What does it mean to live in a such a way as to be a neighbour to other people in the city who are in some ways unlike me? What does it mean to resist gentrification and the forced removal of working class people from certain areas?

The answer is I really don't know. But what Paul Keeble's book has made me think about more deeply is the very act of deciding to live somewhere has theological significance. It may say more about us than our creeds or statements of belief. The Christian church should not abandon the working class inner city, for the middle class surburbs, though it has in some ways.

I was once part of a church in the inner city where every Sunday people drove in from 5- 10 miles away, largely from the suburbs. The church's relationship with the neighbourhood seemed to be one of mutual suspicion. It wasn't a healthy dynamic.

That's not the kind of community we need. Churches may attract people from further afield but they are still situated in a physical space, and they need to relate to the neighbourhood as an act of service and love and mutual benefit. This requires an intentional commitment to resist some aspects of middle class culture and to really work out what it means to love your neighbour.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Love where you live: this is how it starts...

(Published in The Inquirer, 2 June 2018)

It is Sunday morning
and I am not in church. This is still a new experience for me. And a
strange experience. Instead of being in church I am in the streets,
with a litter-picker in one hand and a bin bag in the other. I have
joined a local litter-picking group supported by Keep Wales Tidy and
I am meeting other people who don't go to church, but who gladly give
up their Sunday mornings to make where they live a better place.

My job as a pioneer
minister is to be with these people. My job is to build relationships
with the "unchurched" populations of this city, to be a
citizen where I live, demonstrating my faith by committing to love
where I live.

But what is the point
of it? Am I trying to grow our church in Cardiff? Am I inviting
people to come along to our afternoon service? Well, no. I am not
trying to grow our church. I am not trying to fill up pews. I am not
trying to get people to come to services. I am not trying to get
people to come to events, to coffee mornings, meditation or
discussion groups.

I'm not trying to grow
the church. Why not? Because in not trying to grow a church I am
forced to get to the naked, vulnerable heart of the matter. I am
forced to be out in the world spiritually naked, without any of the
usual clothings of ministry.

In not trying to grow
the church I have to discover what my faith is, what our faith is,
what our good news is, because that is all I have. All I have is
faith. And I have to start with faith, rather than starting with
church.

For the next two or
three years we are running an experiment in evangelism: what happens
when all you have is faith? When all you have is good news? What
happens when you take that faith, that good news into the mystery,
mess, wonder, and chaos of a large modern city?

What is that faith?
What is it that I actually think I'm trying to do? As a pioneer
minister I do need to be able to answer that question. All I have is
faith, and if I don't have that, I can't do my job. I have found that
as a pioneer minister my first priority has to be prayer. I need to
be deeply rooted in a rhythm of prayer that roots my life and work.
For me, being a pioneer minister is an act of complete trust in God.
I find the job before me too big. I know I can't do it by myself. I
can only do it trusting in the power of God. I can only do it if I
believe that faith is in fact what the world needs most urgently. And
I do.

As Paul Rasor at the
Annual Meetings told us, we live in a neoliberal society. This means
a society that believes that competition is the defining
characteristic of human relationships; that society is a market, not
a community; that we are consumers, not citizens, and not children of
God. It is a society based on the values of extreme individualism,
greed, and competitiveness.

This ideology, that has
come to dominate us since the 1980s, is killing us. It ultimately
makes us dissatisfied, miserable, and isolated from each other. It
asks us to put more and more trust in our possessions and less and
less in each other. And it creates an epidemic of loneliness and bad
mental health.

Not only that, it is
destroying our natural environment as constant consumption drives the
wheels of a system that spews out carbon dioxide and is leading us
into a climate catastrophe.

The global problem of
the twenty-first century is climate change: an urgent and massive
problem that nevertheless develops slowly enough for us to be able to
ignore it. But if we ignore it until it's really noticeable in an
everyday sense, it will be too late. Human activity, pushed on by the
ideology of neoliberalism, is creating massive shifts in the climate
that will cause untold misery and death to billions of people and
millions of other species on earth. Right now we are living through a
mass extinction event equivalent to the one that killed the
dinosaurs.

Scientists keep telling
us about this, but there's only so much scientists can do. Gus Speth,
environmental lawyer, has said, "I used to think the top
environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and
climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could
address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental
problems are selfishness, greed and apathy... and to deal with those
we need a spiritual and cultural transformation - and we scientists
don't know how to do that."

Scientists don't know
how to do that. But guess who does know how to do that? Religion
does. Faith does.

This idea has been
taken up by American Unitarian Universalist minister Ian White Maher.
He has argued convincingly that the climate crisis is ultimately a
spiritual crisis. It's not a problem that can be solved by more and
better technology - that is the kind of thinking that caused the
problem in the first place. Rather it is a problem that must be
addressed by a kind of a Twelve Step approach.

In Alcoholics Anonymous
and other Twelve Step programmes you have to admit you are powerless
over the problem - that your life has become unmanageable; and you
have to trust a Power greater than yourself to restore you to sanity. Similarly Ian White Maher says that in order to address the the spiritual
crisis that is causing the climate crisis, we must confess our need
for help from something greater:

"The first step
towards a solution is to admit that we are beyond the point of
avoiding calamitous climate change... The second step is admitting
that we need help. Specifically... humanity needs help from the
divine and creative life force that is greater than the selfish
interests of our individual egos. Anything shy of this confession
will leave us with the illusion that we will somehow, through our own
power and ingenuity, solve the problem. But we cannot solve a
spiritual problem with intellectual solutions."

We need nothing less
than confession and conversion. We need religion. We need more
religion, not less religion. Religion is the only thing with the
proven ability to cause massive cultural and spiritual shifts, to
transform human beings and their values, and we need nothing less
than this. We need to change how we live, how we think, what we
value. We need to find meaning and satisfaction in life in something
other than earning money and buying things and expensive experiences.

It's a challenging
idea, but I have become convinced of it.

I think this really
challenges us as Unitarians. I think, frankly, we no longer have the
luxury to be only about a wishy washy liberalism that says, "well
maybe this or maybe not, we don't know." We no longer have the
luxury to be about every person pursuing their individual
personalised spiritual journey. Indeed I increasingly see that kind
of approach as part of the problem, not the solution.

The great danger for
Unitarianism is that it simply becomes the church of neoliberalism. A
church that preaches individualism and makes spirituality into a
"product" personalised to our own whims and tastes to be
"consumed". The danger is Unitarianism becomes exactly the
kind of religion that re-enforces neoliberalism and climate change,
rather than fights against it.

But as Susan
Frederick-Gray, the new President of the Unitarian Universalist
Association in the US, has said: this is no time for casual faith.

This is no time for a
faith that just copies our consumerist, individualist culture; this
is no time for a faith that is casual, wishy-washy, or uncommitted.
Spiritual transformation cannot happen if we are just a watered-down
version of religion. We need more religion, not less. Religion that
addresses the spiritual crisis that is causing the climate crisis.

That spiritual crisis
is ultimately alienation. Neoliberalism makes us alienated, isolated,
cut off from each other, and from the source of life. Neoliberalism
makes us spiritually, psychologically, politically, economically, and
ecologically alienated.

But it's a lie! The
truth, the spiritual truth our tradition stands for, is that we are
deeply connected within an interdependent web of existence - but we
must awaken to this reality. We must restore a sacred relationship to
our planet and all that is.

In 1838 Ralph Waldo
Emerson addressed a class of newly qualified Unitarian ministers, and
he told them that their mission was to acquaint people first-hand
with Deity. That remains exactly what my pioneer ministry is about.
It is my mission to help people realise and to live as if the
fundamental reality of the universe is relationship, not isolation.

We are not alone, but
part of a mysterious reality, a Power greater than ourselves, that
holds us all together in a greater Oneness. And we can't save the
world, and we can't save ourselves, by going it alone, but we have to
feel and experience for ourselves this sacred relationship; to
realise through worship and prayer that we are part of a mystical
reality of Oneness, and that we are all held within an embrace of
Love. I call that reality God. God as both the One it is possible to
enter into relationship with, and the Relationship itself with all
that is. But this is not something to believe, but something to
experience.

My mission is not to
grow Unitarianism. My mission is to help people experience Sacred
Relationship, and to find fulfilment in relationship, in connection,
in community; not in competing, and consuming, individualism, and
isolation.

I believe religious
community is one of the places where this can happen. But I'm
starting with the mission, and seeing what community can grow out of
that mission, rather than starting with the community and trying to
get people to attend to ensure institutional survival.

I'm not concerned with
the institutional survival of Unitarianism. Ultimately I'm concerned
with the survival of the human race and the planet. And I'm concerned
with creating communities of resistance to our earth-destroying
culture. I'm concerned with making disciples committed to spiritual
practices that resist neoliberalism, and alienation, and create
deeper experiences of sacred relationship. I'm concerned with making
disciples of Love committed to sacred activism.

One of those practices,
for now, is simply picking up litter in my inner-city street. But
this is how it starts. Not (as Mother Teresa said) doing great
things, but doing small things with great love. That's how we build
the resistance.

Saturday, June 02, 2018

The army on the streets of my city

I always shudder when I see the military. I just can't get past the institutionalisation of killing; I can never feel comfortable with an organisation who's primary purpose is violence. It makes me very uncomfortable, frankly it scares the hell out of me.

This week I was made to feel this way when I saw the army outside Cardiff Castle, with a climbing wall being used by small children. I saw children and parents queuing up to use the wall. It was half term outside a major tourist attraction.

I saw families being shown a massive artillery gun. I saw a child look curiously at a rifle on a table apparently unsupervised (I'm sure it wasn't loaded). I felt sick.

I don't want to see weapons of death on a lovely sunny day in my city. It disturbs me to see children being socialised into thinking this is normal, this is OK. This is a kind of a soft PR exercise, an opening for the recruitment of children into the military.

It made me feel literally queasy. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Being a follower of Jesus means my consciousness of such things is heightened. My "normal" is the Christian vision of the kindom of God, the "peaceable kingdom" and so when I see something like this it brings me up as deeply deeply abnormal. I find it abnormal to see objects designed to rip apart human flesh being shown to children. It shocks me. And I look around and wonder how anyone else can think it normal.

All I could do was manage a silent prayer on the spot. I prayed for the people there and for peace and earth, then I kept walking. What more is there to do?